User talk:Skilgannon

Hi Skilgannon, you say on my page that your melee wavesurfing is almost complete. Can you give me your prototype? I hate to suffer all those waves up :) I've idea to surf it in both my talk page and Rednaxela's talk page. You can find my email at my use page. It seem that both you and Rednaxela are working on melee wavesurfing. Thanks! » Nat | Talk » 13:51, 19 February 2009 (UTC)

Hi Skilgannon,

I think you have page deletion permission. We need it, since there are hundreds of spam pages whcih appeared on wiki today.

May be there is a way to get such permissions to new crop of users. Looks like many previously active advanced users are not here anymore.

An admin can mass-cleanup the spam by using Special:Nuke on suspicious users from Special:ActiveUsers, as well as suspicious edits from Special:RecentChanges.

In the light of this, I would like to nominate User:Beaming and User:Cb for admin rights.

Skilgannon's email can be found in Contacts.

More discussion on this attack can be found here and here.

More suggestions:

• IP-ban these bozos.
• Do some of the stuff mentioned here.
• Merge all spam accounts together so we can keep track of them more easily.
• Delete/hide spam entries from Special:RecentChanges.

I also nominating User:MultiplyByZer0 because of active presence at wiki and a lot of clean up effort coming from this user.

Current time: 2017-08-26T09:51:12.423Z

Spammers left to go: 0

Thanks for listing those bot! I think we should take action as soon as possible, e.g. disable account creation and delete spam accounts.

Then may be we should try to add some CAPTCHA for new users?

I made CAPTCHA suggestions here.

I believe it is possible that these spammers are not bots, but low-paid humans working in huge "spam farms". A registration CAPTCHA should therefore require at least basic knowledge of Robocode (e.g. name one sample bot).

In any case, nothing is going to happen until Skilgannon wakes up.

Great ideas! Thank you for your effort!

Yes registration only CAPTCHA can be easily skipped by low paid humans, however it seems that the spams are created by machines — therefore adding a CAPTCHA when creating/editing pages for new users may help ;)

Given that every new spam user posts about 3 pages and then stop, I would say that bots hacked the CAPTCHA algorithm.

I think we should make registration harder and then we will be fine.

I have blocked and deleted the pages of the following entries. (Move them to a bottom list or something?)

Abdul
Abhi2828
Abhishek.upadhyay11
Adamsmith
Ahmad1234
Ahmadd123
Ajaykapadia2
Akki
Alex
Alexa
Alexdogge1
Alexyokei
Alhaji
Amit8923
Andoralifs
Andrusmith1
Anisingh
Anjilajolia
Anjilajoliaa
ANNU17
Anshu01
Araja
Asdasd
Ashish12345
Ashish786786
Astrologerbaba16
Avisupport
Baba786
Bisafepa
Bitcoinsssupport
Blizzardbluee
Bookentry
Bradyswan
Brandi84
Bujelizala
Caira
Caleb
Cbkjvjvkd
Chorsupport
Chunnu7294383gulabo
Cooljass1
Cuwerokume
Cybertechnisdhhdh
Dabbu
Dante
Dasfgs
Dear
Depih12
Dev123
Dexter6789
Dfasffasf
Dfgvfgvfsd5
Dfjhfgj
Dfsdf
Dgdfhfgjhfgh
Dhanraj99
Dinni999
Dk923478
Dolka01
Dpkapadia1
Dsgdfhg
Dsgsdhjfe
Dykywipy
Ellis S Skinner
Emma000001
Emmawatson
Emmie2680
Engineer123
Ergugfdguf
Eswt
Faer
Fairsearches.pradeep
Faisal
Faulkner
Fdbhdf525
Fibarip
Frankgel
Fransis99
Fullsupport
Gakllerjohn
Gattu
Ghfdhfg
Ghufgt567121
Gibson
Ginjuilinhj
Gk707027
Gofyozilto
Gopalamj
Gtrtgum
Guwogepome
Hajsfdjorkgpgk12
Harryji
Hemantvar
Herry9
Ginjuilinhj

Hi Chase,

Could you please revert back Help:Editing?

And also restore the Main Page's talk page, which is here: http://robowiki.net/wiki/Talk:$$_1-855-665-7666@_HP_Service_Phone_Number_HP_Service_Phone_Number_Support_Number0572

And also RoboWiki:Copyrights

Okay, it looks like GrubbmGait and Voidious are blocking spam accounts, and account creation has been disabled.

We still need to fix the main page, though.

I have located the main page here: http://robowiki.net/wiki/$$_1-855-665-7666@_HP_Service_Phone_Number_HP_Service_Phone_Number_Support_Number0572

Unfortunately, I do not have permissions to move it back.

Thanks everyone for jumping in here! I turned off account creation again (for now), blocked a bunch of accounts, and mass deleted the pages they created. Also restored the Main Page (thanks for pointing to it!). I'll continue later, but I am a little busy at work atm / today...

We have faced a lot of wiki spam - we have Captcha on account creation, some custom anti-spam code, no anonymous edits. But eventually we just fell too far behind. Like MultiplyByZero said, I think these may be a mix of bots and real people. Surely we could get to a decent setup with upgrading MediaWiki and finding the right plugins, we just never made time (yet).

And yeah, I'd love to discuss getting a new admin or two on board! We haven't added anybody new in a while and indeed all the current ones are sort of retired.

Thanks a lot User:Voidious, User:GrubbmGait, and User:Chase-san for cleaning the wiki. Special thanks to User:MultiplyByZer0 for tracking spamming users.

I have been through all the accounts of the 'Active users list' and Mass deleted and blocked the appropriate accounts. Seems that all New created pages are deleted at this moment. In that active users list still some spammers are listed, but they did more subtle things like minor edits and moving pages. Someone with a bit more knowlegde of wiki-stuff should go through their contributions and try to erase those.

Thanks for this colossal work. I've seen you deleting non stop for at least an hour.

Would you be able to revert some important pages as well? They are listed above this thread in reply to Chase-san.

Talk:Main Page has been restored afaik. But for the other two, without knowing where they went, it is hard for me to revert them.

Crap... I am very sorry guys. My git sync with wiki goofed up. I incindently restored spam pages.

Good news they all marked and sit in Category:Spam

They are removed (again), for this time I did not block you ;-) Note that a lot of new users have been created without any contributions yet, so spamming is still possible. And it would be nice if the 'Deletion log's could be hidden, now it is almost impossible to see what normal contributions have been made the last few days/weeks.

I have scanned through 'all pages' and deleted all spampages there, luckily easy to recognize due to loooong page names. Afaik no more spam is present, just some contributions from the Active user list that I can't locate anywhere. So, my 'spamming' of deletion logs is over, so Xor and Dsekercioglu and others can now see any discussions again.

‎Heartgold537 just spammed. It seems we forget somebody?

Those buggers are smart. They create an account and then spam from it after some time passes. This is exactly what GrubbmGait predicted above.

We just need to embrace ourself for couple weeks. I suggest to put

[[Category:Spam]]

text within the offending pages so admins have easier time to track them down.

Yes it helps. Anyway, the best way against human spammers is that we have more people than them;) At least with more admins it really helps.

MultiplyByZer0 sees the wiki very frequently, we would react to spammers much faster if he were admin as well;)

Well, we just need to be patient. As much as I hate spammers, wiki will run even with spam inside. Wiki is not the twitter where everything should be immediately up-to-date.

I personally monitor Recent changes in my rss reader, so I see the invasion within couple hours. But we cannot expect admin reaction time to be much faster than a day or even week.

This is not the first spam wave (though the largest I remember) which we survived.

See Thread:Talk:RoboRumble/Participants/Remove bots with underscores in version numbers?/reply (2)

Would you mind removing the retired ones with underscores in version numbers from the rumble please?

Hi, Thanks for opening the code. I am looking forward to digest it. One question, I noticed that many bot have booleans labeled TC and MC. Are these for target and movement challenges? If so where is the bots collection and who runs the challenge?

These flags are for competing in the challenges, not for being part of a challenge. So putting TC=true disables the movement, and MC=true disables the gun.

Although maybe I misunderstood you, the following are where it is used: movement challenges: Movement Challenge and Movement Challenge 2K6, targeting challenges: Targeting Challenge, Targeting Challenge 2K6 and Targeting Challenge 2K7.

You run the battles yourself using something like RoboResearch, which puts out the results in a wiki-friendly format.

Also Targeting Challenge RM, which I think is the most useful one.

And also RoboRunner / RoboJogger has some advantages over RoboResearch, the main one being a big speed increase because it doesn't restart the JVM after every match.

Yes, you understood me right. I've seen the pages about those challenges in the wiki, but since I jump the train to late, I missed the discussion of their purpose. Which, I am guessing, are to tune guns and movements separately. But on those pages, I've seen long tables with ranking, so I thought they were created by some sort of a statistics bot, like we have with rumble now.

Also, I am big fan of RoboRunner. I just need to find a proper subset of bots to correlate its results with the full rumble. I sometimes see an improvement vs. my local subset and a drop in a rumble.

Oh, right, I remember seeing that you used RoboRunner, which made me happy. :-)

The targeting challenges I consider pretty useful and a good predictor of rumble performance. The movement challenges, less so. My most useful Robocode testing was usually against large test beds constructed with BedMaker. I updated it in July to work with LiteRumble, if you want to give it a try.

I should try it, but the question is which bots to choose? Assuming incremental improvements, should I aim to gain vs top bots or similar score ones?

The reason I ask for your wisdom is the following. I recall once I gain a couple of points against top bots, but the score was worse for majority of the medium and lower bots. This happens when I added more advance guns to be dodged to an enemy bot. This helped against top bots, but weaker bots gained on me. I still puzzled by it.

So ideal test bed, should have a representative from each group.

Also, a side note. I noticed that Diamond sometimes get disabled right at the beginning of the game. Most likely some minor bug but if you fix it, you might get to the 1st place. I think this bug happens only in melee.

The one movement challenge which I found was a good indicator of rumble performance was the MC2K7, since there you have a gun (everybody has the same gun), and your opponent moves, so you have the same incentives to improve as in the actual rumble.

So I just noticed the "meleeTop30rumble" ... Are we specifically trying NOT to call it the "GigaMeleeRumble"? :-) I was just getting archived rankings working again (and @roborumble on Twitter) and paused at what to call it. Any objection to GigaMeleeRumble?

No objections here. Also, glad to see you pulled back into this world of battle.

I managed to get Nene up two more ranks recently (But haven't really been working on it much tbh).

Haha, thanks. :-) It's nice to get rrtweeter and rrarchiver up and running again, but don't expect a new version of Diamond any time soon. :-P

Why not? ;)

The only thing I'm still interested in is beating DrussGT head-to-head. But ever since I started development on BerryBots, it's just felt wrong to spend any of my recreational coding time on Robocode bots. I've got the new AngularJS web UI mostly done and I also have a cool new stage that I want to write. Plus I've got an entirely new, fully web-based game in mind which is just in brainstorm / research phase... So yeah, Robocode bots are a no-go. :-)

Well, I would argue the GigaRumble should be renamed to the Top30Rumble. I was the one who created the meleeTop30rumble. The name make sense to me. Top30 is self speaking, unlike GigaMeleeRumble which confusingly seems to be opposite of nano/micro/mini, i.e. refers to the size. I presume it has some historical roots, but I joined robocode too late to know the meaning of the Giga name.

May be someone with longer presence can enlighten us about the Giga name history.

Well, originally the name was Strongest Bots Rumble. Yeah, I used "giga" as a riff on (bigger than) "mega" when we finally implemented it, whatever 9 years later.

Hi Skilgannon,

I noticed you removed Morfeas because my clients do not run/process it. Do you have any idea why is happening? May be we need some sort of guideline for robocoders to use a particular java version so rumble clients can process it.

I remember that for a long time I was using the older opejdk version (v6) and it was not capable to run v7 bots. But currently I have the v7 installed everywhere, so I have no idea why a particular bot would be exclude from competition.

I suspect it is compiled with v8. I noticed that the pairings weren't filling, so clearly it has compatibility issues with something on your setup.

Hi, can you please add the flag of Latvia to the literumble? I have posted it here. Thanks.

Sorry I haven't had that much to contribute lately, but I've been doing real work instead ;-) Anyway, I thought you might like to take a peak at a small by-product of my work over the last year and a half - this is a map of one of the floors of the building next to (and above) my lab (caution! 4813x4168 image!)

This is all done with kD-Trees and a bunch of linear algebra on the software side, the hardware side uses a Hokuyo laser scanner and an Inertial Measurement Unit (integrated gyro, accelerometer and 3D compass) all mounted on the top of a radio control car. The map can be built in real-time and shows me a nice position of the car on it as it drives around, so I can easily tell what still needs mapping =)

I hope to be back with something to liven up the rumble soon!

That sounds cool! And pretty fun. =) So the car navigates itself, too? Do you do any pathfinding like with graphs or just trace your way along walls?

Btw, what kind of R/C car is it? Just curious. I was into R/C cars quite a bit when I was really young. (Like too young to build my own cars, just tagging along with Dad and older brother and racing.)

I have some simple wall following in, but right now the car is manually controlled. My project is more based on getting good maps out of it.

It's a pretty tough 4WD thing with knobbly tires. Overkill, but it means that some time in the future we can switch to 3D mapping and send it anywhere.

What brand / model is it? This conversation got me looking at the modern RC10's from Team Associated. :-) But maybe I'm just assuming it's a "real" / expensive R/C car since I remember you were into R/C helicopters too.

Yeah, it's the expensive, modular type. I would estimate it cost ~$300, but the lab owns it, not me. I'm not sure on the brand, I can check when I go in next year =) I actually mostly do quadcopters and planes as well as some DIY things, including all of the embedded programming and electronics for driving motors and speaking with gyros and accelerometers. Fun stuff, but it sucks time and money! I'm also looking at 3D printing, but that can wait until I graduate.

Ah, looks similar to the Team Associated stuff, but electric and 4WD. And we took the cover off and put on a custom platform which holds a bunch of very expensive electronics.

Yeah, I always raced electric, but gas has gotten much more popular since I stopped racing. But I think lots of folks (including Team Associated) still sell electric cars too.

That all sounds pretty neat. But it is indeed a huge money drain, which makes me hesitant to dip my toes in again. :-) So I recall 2 of the 3 main pieces of electronics in cars were "speed control" for controlling the motor and servo for the physical steering. You're saying you actually program those devices yourself, right? Is that just low level programming or designing/modifying circuits too?

A bit of both. It takes some embedded programming knowledge to interpret the signals coming from the radio receiver (I don't bother with trying to make those), figuring out what it is saying, then applying whatever actions you are looking for to the motors or possibly modifying the signal from the receiver and passing it on to servos. The actual 'speed control' is pretty easy electronics wise, particularly if you don't want reverse. If you want reverse and breaking it becomes a bit more complicated and uses about 4x the components, as well as the risk of destroying hardware if you have bugs in your code. You get chips that do it all for you, but then you might as well just buy a commercial solution since you lose a lot of the fine-grained control that the custom solution gives. Servos can also be done custom, but it's easier just to get a commercial one since servo control is a surprisingly complicated problem involving damping, oscillations and holding torque, all of which are dependant on the exact specs of the motor, geartrain and the voltage the servo is running off of. So, low level programming applied to a knowledge of fairly standard power electronics.

I just ran across an interesting article:

http://www.i-programmer.info/news/105-artificial-intelligence/4526-poison-attacks-against-machine-learning.html

That's pretty interesting stuff, and not just in relation to Robocode.

As for Robocode applications, poisoning the enemy's guns with data also carries the risk of not dodging bullets, since the data gathering and the classification are so intertwined. But it's the type of technique you'd only use against high level opponents, like we do with flatteners, so it's already a situation where you're not able to dodge very accurately.

But I wonder... One thing it mentions is that this is possible if you have access to the same data as the enemy. In Robocode, of course we do, technically. But if that were really true, we'd be able to emulate the enemy's gun stats and do perfect curve flattening and never get hit. So I think it's probably closer to true that we don't have access to the same data as the enemy.

Actually it is possible to emulate opponent guns unless they use some pseudo-random technique. But we don't perfectly emulate because there are many different guns from many different opponents and few bots try to classify and specialize against the bot it is battling against (i.e. ScannedRobotEvent.getName()). Generalist bots are more fun.

Interesting fact is, this concept is already being used in RoboRumble for years.

PatternMatching (learning)... Anti-pattern matching (counter-learning)... GuessFactors (learning)... FlatMovement (counter-learning)... Dynamic Clustering... data decay...

In some sense, we are at the bleeding edge of AI advancement. There are very few AI competitions with imperfect information around the world other than Robocode. I can only think of one or two.

Basically what they explains is ways to use the minimum of 'false' information (in Robocode terms that means intentionally skewing your movement profile, but with increased chance of getting hit) in order to maximize the chance that they will incorrectly classify future data (ie, aim in the wrong place next time).

I agree anti-pattern matching and anti-GF have been effective at dodging their specific type of targeting, however this is a different concept entirely. This is about intentionally behaving in a certain way so that they will think you will do this next time, not behaving that way because you know exactly where they will shoot.

I would love to apply this somehow, because I think our learning guns are very susceptible to this. Sure, they all shoot differently at surfers meaning you can't take one gun and dodge another, but when you consider a movement profile with obvious peaks they all tend to shoot in the same way. Our wavesurfing flattens the profile, but all that does is bring us to the edge cases where every gun will shoot differently. If instead we have peaks that are obvious, all of the guns will shoot in the same way, making it possible to better predict their bullets and thus dodge them more reliably.

Hmm. I disagree with all guns shooting the same way at the obvious spikes, because I think there is really a lot of variety in gun configurations, especially once you start getting into Anti-Surfer guns. But most guns, even AS guns, are learning a lot from virtual waves. So the ideal situation is that you're creating really strong spikes in those virtual waves but still dodging the dangerous spots of real waves. That seems pretty difficult, but maybe possible.

On a semi-related note, I definitely think there's lots of room for improvement in surf stats with proactive stuff like this. I've put in a bunch of effort on "light" flatteners to flatten movement even against weaker learning guns, or switching to a different random movement profile each time I'm hit instead of actually dodging past bullet hits. So far I haven't had any success, but I still think there's something to those ideas. It bothers me that I have to get hit to change my movement profile.

I cited the wrong strategies then.

Wave Surfing is a movement strategy which keeps dodging waves the same way until it sees a bullet. The bullet usually means a spike in the opponent profile. Then it exploits the spike by changing the movement.

Screwing up virtual wave data seems a good idea. Put some virtual wave spike evaluation in the WS danger function? Minimize (avoid) real waves spikes and maximize virtual waves spikes... Some kind of anti-"anti-surfer gun" movement...

I think Skilgannon is right that this concept is different than current Robocode strategies, which are not proactive about painting an incorrect picture to the enemy. The only thing I can think of along these lines is oldwiki:AntiMirrorSystem, but even that is not really poisoning enemy data, just an exploit for a specific movement strategy.

Also, from what little I remember of SVMs, I think they may be much more susceptible to poisoning than KNN. They try to find the best plane to split the data space, so this method probably tries to plant points that alter the plane as much as possible. I think KNN would be much more resilient to this type of manipulation.

Hmm, interesting.

Regarding, "proactive about painting an incorrect picture to the enemy", two things come to mind that fit that category:

1. Chase bullets (but that's taking advantage of the 'bookkeeping' not the learning)
2. Robots which 'intentionally' look different to tick waves than bullet waves

A pure flattener also kind of fits this description in my mind, because it's all about going somewhere that it won't go in the future, it just looks at it from the opposite direction in time. It's just that it can't do a hugely accurate job of it due to the variety of configurations.

I think that one of the advantages of the usual "statistical" methods, is that they are more difficult to poison, because they don't "speculate" beyond what they've directly observed. In general I suspect that the same types of things that make a learning method robust to data from both multi-mode bots and random bots, also tend to make it more resistant to poisoning.

Maybe a flattener which instead of going where it was hit the least (most bots), goes where it was hit the most, but still below a certain threshold. Artificially create a spike in the opponent profile, then avoid it when it goes over the threshold. The data is poisoned until another higher spike appears, which might take a while without data decay. If the bot starts flattening the profile afterwards, it might take a looong time for another spike to form.

Can work in theory, but the threshold is different for each opponent. And data decay can quick get rid of poisoned data.